Music Playback and Ripping Hands-on

When you pop a CD into the PlayStation 3, it will of course wind up under the Music heading of the Cross Media Bar. After you've agreed to the privacy policy agreement for nabbing track info online, the system will name your CD and its individual tracks. As you scroll through the tracks, you'll see its name, the artist and album its from and its track length.

Pressing Triangle, you're able to play a track, import it or view more information. By choosing Information, you'll see not only the track, album and artist info, but its genre and how large the file size will be if you import it. Import settings are located under Settings->Music Settings in the XMB, and you can choose to rip tracks as an AAC, MP3 or ATRAC file. For each of these, you have a number of bitrate options. MP3 will hit 320kbps at its highest rate.

We imported Dredg's Live at the Fillmore disc. It runs over 76 minutes in length, essentially maxing out a CD's capacity. The ripping process took somewhere around six minutes.

The storage process looks to be the same as the PSP where the albums are stored at the root, rather than going Artist->Album->Song. You are able to change the sorting type, be it by artist, album or so forth, but everything is only divided on one level. Playback controls are much like you'd see on the PS2, with rewind, fast-forward, pause, play, etc.

Update: By pressing the PlayStation button, you'll bring up the Cross Media Bar again, allowing you to multi-task while your music still plays. If you being a movie or start playing a game, playback will stop, but at least you're able to listen to music while browsing the web or manipulating data.

Via IGN